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FairAndUnbalanced is a WeBlog bringing focus to popular insights on top political issues from today's news media. FU puts you in the pundits' seat. Tell it like it is, and get strong reaction from others who agree or disagree. Either way, you can be assured that lively debate will ensue - and democratic values will be celebrated in a political forum that surpasses anything our forefathers ever envisioned! At FU, free speech honored to the fullest, intelligent dialogue on current events is welcomed, and people who are looking for drooling idiocy can just go somewhere else...

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The umbrella man of Dealey Plaza was never a serious analyst of nuclear limits.

He wasn't in 1963.

He isn't today.

And we should answer conservatives as they try to bring him back.

Transcript:

I was in my 40's before I made the pilgrimage to Dealey Plaza in Dallas. I walked along the grassy knoll. I looked through a window near to that used by the assassin as he took aim at the President of the United States. Most modern reconstructions of the murder are very close to the original report published by the investigating commission led by Chief Justice Earl Warren.

The idea that John F. Kennedy was killed by a delusional gunman, a gunman convinced that he would play some important role in a post-revolutionary America, was worse than absurd. It cast the tragedy as a hopelessly morbid joke, robbing a singularly significant death of meaning beyond the mortality common to us all. It would have been as if the President had died choking on a chicken bone.

Yes they do, as per the gruesome statement from “Dr.” Nucatola I quoted in my article. Do you assert that this fact was misrepresented by me, Mr. Deming?

Next, I have long requested that the half billion dollars of tax payer money spent each year to subsidize this grotesque institution is removed. Finding that they give the body parts of the babies they kill to “medical research” only further convinces me that this needs to be done NOW.

Last, the pertinent parts of the videos in question that I wrote my article upon were accurate and in complete context. It is amazing the contortions that the left will go through in order to defend their actions. The fact of the matter is Planned Parenthood is a scandal-ridden organization that kills millions of unborn with the assistance of over $500 million annually in tax payer subsidies. Further, they often abort these children in such a way as to be able to “save” the victims’ organs for medical research. Dr. Mengele would be proud, despite President Cecile’s apologies and protestations to the contrary that they are providing “services”. Woe to those that call evil, good and good, evil.

As John would advise, you need to argue what you believe for the reasons you believe it. Your problem is with abortion, period. You object to using fetal tissue for research because you object to abortion. You object to the doctor's dispassionate discussion because you object to abortion. If that is the case--if you cannot provide, as I requested, an argument against using fetal tissue in research without reference to the wrongness of abortion--then I ask that you refrain from making statements like this:

"Finding that they give the body parts of the babies they kill to 'medical research' only further convinces me that this needs to be done NOW."

Don't make it seem like there's more to this than there really is.

We call this a faux scandal not because we are OK with abortion or the use of fetal tissue in research, but because the video offers no new information except the falsehood that it is edited to suggest. It is no more a reason to be outraged than any other video one might take at Planned Parenthood, since we all know that these procedures take place there.

"If 'researchers' are in need of more fetal stem cells derived from victims’ organs etc. for their 'valuable' work, don’t you think that the likelihood of an increase in abortions will also be observed accordingly?"

You seem to be forgetting another party involved in the process: the mother. She chooses whether or not to have an abortion and she chooses whether or not to grant permission for the use of fetal tissue in research. No one is being forced to do anything, so whether or not researchers desire or need more fetal tissue for research should have little bearing on the frequency of abortions.

lled their victims, but does that mean that their scientific research in doing so should be discounted? By your logic, it is the same ghoulish thing."

Actually, it's the same thing according to your logic, since you begin with the premise that killing a fetus and killing (what I call) a person are the same thing. Since I do not, I can condemn Nazi behavior and approve of Planned Parenthood's actions without inconsistency. If you had taken even a moment to think about what you know to be my position from our previous exchanges on this matter, you wouldn't have bothered to say this. I know you're capable, so I'm not sure what to make of your consistent refusal to do so.

"On a tangent, most all of the greatest and most promising work done with stem cells to date has occurred with adult and umbilical cord cells rather than fetal stem cells. But that doesn’t fit into the Planned Parenthood altruistic narrative, does it?"

That's irrelevant to the "narrative." Even if it's true that "most all of the greatest and most promising work" occurred without fetal tissue, that does not mean that all of it did or that nothing good may come out of it in the future. And even if nothing ever came of it or ever will come of it, we are talking about people who don't regard abortion or the tissue harvesting as evil in the first place. Your point is not on its own a reason to condemn this research.

Ultimately, our moral analysis of this issue depends on the moral value that we assign to the fetus at a given stage in its development. You care about the fetus above all; some of us care more about letting the mother do as she wishes with her body; and some of us, concerned with sentience or capacity for pain or some other morally relevant characteristic that separates us from rocks, don't think that the fetus deserves any moral recognition at all for a fair amount of time.

Ryan generously contributes his insights to our debates. He can often be found at Secular Ethics, a site devoted to the application of reason to ethical behavior.

The courageous T. Paine is appreciated for taking on a Sisyphean task: persuading us of the virtues of conservatism. He can be found at Saving Common Sense.

While Republican leaders and the conservative media continue to try to capitalize on the fraudulent video “sting” showing a Planned Parenthood official discussing fetal tissue donation over a salad, the rest of the world is apparently unimpressed with the entire spectacle.

A website that tracks mass shootings in the US had logged 203 through Wednesday. It hasn’t caught up with last night’s rampage in a Louisiana theater, but when it does, that will be No. 204—and yesterday was the 204th day of the year, the worst kind of synchronicity, notes the Washington Post.

Come on! Invest 5 minutes in interplanetary beauty. Infidel 753 has discovered a video of what may come to Mars. It's based on photos from NASA, JPL, the University of Arizona, and the Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican nominee John McCain traveled to Ynez, Kentucky to announce his economic vision in the place where LBJ launched the War on Poverty back in 1965. His solution for Americans struggling to make ends meet? Ebay:

For the past five years, Republicans determined to gut federal spending have been warning that "we look a lot like Greece." A preposterous claim then, the charge is even more ridiculous now. Unlike Greece, the United States controls its own currency and has enjoyed economic growth even as Washington's national debt as a share of its GDP is only about half that of Athens. Since President Obama first took the oath of office, federal spending has been flat and the annual budget deficit was reduced by two-thirds. And while cuts at the state and local government level produced an anti-stimulus that dramatically slowed the American recovery, the U.S. has avoided the Greek "death spiral" of draconian austerity policies which inevitably lead to economic contraction and falling tax revenues and thus more austerity.

This past Tuesday, President Barack Obama spoke at that NAACP National Convention. For me, that was the highlight of the Convention. Unlike some of his past speeches to black audiences, he did not lecture us about personal responsibility. He did not entertain us with singing and other Negro antics. In his speech, President Obama discussed real problems plaguing the black communities, problems such as mass incarceration, sentencing disparities, poverty, unemployment and housing discrimination.

Let's be clear about what is going on in Greece. A bunch of European banks made big loans to Greece, and Greece could not pay them back. All of this "austerity" is about making the Greek people pay the banks back for their bad investments. None of the money raised by these measures is going to Greece- it's all going to the bankers who made their bad investments.

Well, you know what? Here's how I thought capitalism is supposed to work:

The IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, who will be inspecting these sites, hasn't sounded an alarm regarding the 24 day waiting period. Their statement, click here, indicates they are confident they can determine what Iran is doing by the end of the year.

You'd think that the IAEA would be sounding the alarm if the waiting period would prevent them from doing their work.

As to the agreement as a whole, what are our alternatives? Even if the US does not sign on, Europe will. Unilateral sanctions from the US will only further erode our standing as a leader in the world.

But let's say the United States doesn't ratify the agreement, and neither do any of the other parties. What then? Iran has no possible incentive to stop pursuing nuclear weapons. They have learned the same lesson that North Korea has: if you want to be left alone, arm yourself with nuclear weapons.

And once Iran has nuclear arms, they won't give them up. The entire world has learned to hold on to your nukes or else you'll end up like Ukraine, with half your country occupied.

Even if this merely delays Iran from gaining militarized nuclear capabilities for ten years-- or even for one year, that's time that we didn't have before.

Jeffrey Lewis was so eager to read the Iran nuclear deal that he woke up at 3:30 am California time to pore through all 150-plus pages of the text. Lewis is a nukes super nerd: He's the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and also runs an excellent arms control blog network and arms control podcast and has a regular arms control column in Foreign Policy. He is the person to talk to on this.

When Lewis and I first spoke, in early 2015, he was skeptical, as a lot of arms control analysts were.

Negotiators in Vienna had announced the Iran nuclear deal only an hour earlier, but Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican presidential candidate, was already on the airwaves denouncing it.

VIENNA — Iran and a group of six nations led by the United States said they had reached a historic accord on Tuesday to significantly limit Tehran’s nuclear ability for more than a decade in return for lifting international oil and financial sanctions.

President Obama is more concerned with having some foreign policy "coup" for his legacy than he is the safety of America, our ally of Israel, and the Middle East in general.

He agrees to a bunch of items that cannot be enforced and will be violated by Iran, while giving away the farm. After Iran does violate them, Russia and probably many of the other countries will not re-establish sanctions on Iran, so our leverage is gone.

We basically just helped Iran economically while allowing them to jump forward covertly with their nuclear weapons program, all the while they were chanting "Death to America!" in the streets this week.

I am disgusted with this narcissistic fool. And the rest of the progressives thinks this country and the world are just getting better and better under his reign.

At this point, I am hoping the ugly state of Texas does secede so I have some place that still respects liberty and common sense in which to live.

I am impressed by your grasp of such details prior to their general publication.

Experts who were given access to those same details early this morning, apparently ahead of everyone but yourself, are impressed with the high degree of verification you have insisted is your primary concern. According to their initial analysis, inspectors will have ongoing access to all nuclear facilities capable of producing weapons grade materials. They will also have immediate access to any additional sites they regard as suspicious.

Of course, those experts have not checked with you before forming their first impressions.

Our allies, the ones President Obama convinced to join in sanctions, are unanimously impressed with those controls, however. Having less instant expertise than you, it seems to me that if our allies cannot be trusted to re-impose sanctions should it become necessary, our President (your President and mine) would not have been able to convince them to have imposed sanctions to begin with.

The speed of your rapid judgments are a testament to your intelligence. A less trusting person than myself might suspect you of being less motivated by national security concerns than by partisanship.

Hmmm... our allies are impressed, you say? I think one of our key allies, who's very existence might depend upon many aspects of this perplexing agreement, might have been excluded from that list of "allies". They seem to be less than impressed.

The fact that you are rather celebratory of this accord prior to the general publication of the facts would lead a lesser trusting man then myself to suspect you were motivated by partisanship rather than by national security and the safety of our only democratic ally in the region, my friend.

I suspect once those details are all made public, that my fears will be justified. Care to make a wager on this, sir?

The US loony right wing's response to this agreement is following the same trajectory as their fixation on Obama's birth certificate. No amount of evidence, no amount of verification can ever be enough. It's Obama's, therefore it's suspect.

Most of the people taking this stance clearly have no detailed understanding of Iran's internal political dynamics, either. It's all one big amorphous bogeyman to them.

Then there's Marco Rubio, who gave a speech criticizing Obama's Iran policy in which he basically said that Iran is aligned with ISIS, whereas in fact it's fighting harder against ISIS than anyone else except the Kurds.

Sorry, I prefer to rely on the judgment of actual nuclear-proliferation experts.

Thank you, T. Paine, for your insight into my emotional response. Until your mind probe, I was unaware of any celebration on my part.

It is true that Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the nuclear restriction agreement prior to its having been reached. His stand was less a rebuttal than a prebuttal.

I was instead referring to the partner nations who were interested in exploring the potential of negotiation, rather than rejecting all possibilities for nuclear limitations in favor of war as a very first step.

That would be Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States, Germany, and the European Union. They were unanimous in demanding, and apparently receiving, the very verification you earlier had insisted would be the foundation of a very good agreement.

It is hard to express the degree of my appreciation for your offer to wager on your future rejection of the details you already have rejected.

Conservative partisans in Congress attempted to torpedo the negotiations, writing a public letter warning Iran not to sign any agreement. They were willing to take the chance of our children going to war for the sake of uninformed rejectionism.

VIENNA — Iran and a group of six nations led by the United States said they had reached a historic accord on Tuesday to significantly limit Tehran’s nuclear ability for more than a decade in return for lifting international oil and financial sanctions.